1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is generally related to a computerized negotiation process. Specifically, a software module assists the negotiation process by processing, summarizing, and presenting requests and offers and making recommendations based on having evaluated goals/objectives of the participants and a history of the present and/or past negotiations. Goals, objectives, and strategies are based upon public attributes which are known to all parties in the negotiation, as well as private attributes known only to the party entering that party's respective private attributes.
2. Description of the Related Art
Consider the following reverse auction scenario having one buyer and many sellers. The buyer initiates a Request For Quote (RFQ) that contains the requirements and the specifications for each commodity and specific quantity. A commodity in the context of the present invention means any product, good, or service sought by a buyer. Each commodity has a list of attributes also called “product attributes”. An attribute can have a continuous value such as “4.5”, “876”, etc., or can have discrete values such as “large”, “red”, etc.
The RFQ includes a list of attributes and a list of commodities. Each seller can bid on one or more commodities. The quantity offered by each seller for each item might be less than the required amount. Once all the bids have been received, the buyer will evaluate them based on specific criteria and can use different strategies and policies to negotiate with each seller. The negotiation will continue until one or more parties decides to stop, with or without having reached a contract. The present invention will make a negotiation more efficient by helping a buyer and a seller to make critical decisions at each negotiation phase as well as recommending compromises among the several parties.
A decision maker can handle manually a simple Request For Quote (RFQ) with a limited number of suppliers. However, as soon as the complexity of constraints increases and the number of suppliers grows exponentially, the economic and strategic factors become part of the negotiation process, and decision making will take longer or run into problems. Fierce competition in the future will require that the time, cost, and risk in decision-making be reduced. To overcome these limitations, decision makers need a framework that can optimize the decision complexity and cover specific company strategies, as well as to satisfy constraint requirements.
Disadvantages of current negotiation techniques include the cost in money and time for failed negotiations, a possible tendency to compromise quickly, and a possible tendency to prematurely drop parties in the negotiation. Further, prior to the present invention, there has been no known system to address these issues. Negotiations would profit by an automation of the negotiation process, an automated system in which a prediction of the next move can be made, the possibility of negotiation failure is decreased, the time to reach an agreement is speeded up, and the cost of negotiation is reduced.